The universal multi-platform open-source online multiplayer project.

DC: Alien Front Online – Soon ready for testing

theres been about a year since I made the announcement that AFO would go back online.

New servers have been written and just a few bugs will have to be sorted before the server will be functional like the old ones.

I appreciate the donations from everyone of you, and you are the reason for the speed-up the last couple of weeks. I had no time or motivation to keep working on it until I started recieving both big and small donations, and for that I am sincerely grateful – the infrastructure in the works now might help us get other titles back aswell, and for that donations are an excellent way of letting me know that this is important to you, but by all means, noone is obligated to do so.

This is going to get me hyped. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since it was first announced that this would happen. Pretty soon I can get to see a part of Sega’s history that I totally missed since I abandoned them at a young age for Sony.

Hell yeah dude. AFO will be great online. Just wondering…. Is there a single discord server for dreamcast players? Xlink Kai has its own discord and it makes bringing in new players and organizing games super easy and creates a nice community. I’m actually talking to a few people on there to use dreampi to get their dreamcasts online. The dreamcast has tons of interest, but it’s spread out. I think it would be good to unify everyone on discord. Just a suggestion.

Great to see an update on this. I am super stoked. I only have a BBA, so I am gonna have to build a DreamPI in the near future to play this game online.

I remember awhile back when asked about connecting, you said that there were “some quite interesting features that are left within the game regarding options for connecting.” Could you shed some light on what you meant by that? What sort of things do you mean.

Do you mean the game can connect via RAS over a coders cable to a Windows NT VM? I’ve done this using Windows CE that’s cool if an actual game could do that even if there is no function calls to use it

More details to come, but tl;dr: Yes, the game supports connections through serial modems aswell as other features. Rumour has it that someone is going to leak a modified version of the game in the near future.

AFO has been (one of) my favorite online Dreamcast games, highly anticipated to see this title resurrected. Something that peaks my interest is reading about those hidden connection methods, despite hidden they are still useable? In particular “*Serial modem/connection”… if so that would mean a VS Link game has been hiding in plain sight all these years? :O :)

Its more of the kind where you connect through a serial modem connected to the serial-port, OR serial-cable directly to your PC for example, and share your broadband-connection through the serial-cable which allows for *higher* speeds.

I just got the emphasis on “higher speeds”. I downloaded the manual for my Netopia router recently and it said something about the serial port in the back would end up doubling the 56kbps to 112kbps. On top of that if you ended up throwing a 56k external modem on top of that it would raise it to 168kbps easily tripling it. Then again that port is designed mainly for Macintosh computers from around that time so I don’t know how feasible that would be on a Dreamcast. Also as a disclaimer that network speeds will never hit the max speed since that is a theoretical number that would be slapped onto it before factoring the download and upload speeds, and any other hardware added onto it.

Looking forward to more games coming back online, just need more users playing them :)

Been in too many empty, PSO and Toy Racer servers but hopefully Worms and AFO will boost the community.

I would happy to to promote the news on my site once they are up and running.

If you need anyone to help testing the servers at crazy times as I’m from the UK, that could explain why many servers for me are empty because all the guys over the pond are asleep (apart from Dan of course)

Deployment of the servers takes some time and news will be posted as soon as everything is up and running – that I can assure you. I’m not holding back anything, but I won’t be deploying servers that are not “production-ready”. I can assure you all that once everything is up and running, site will be updated with news and you will hear about from every DC site there is. So please be patient – there might also be other games just around the corner that are ready for deployment in a short time.

News will come around when it is time. The release is still TBA. Give the guy a break. If everyone stops asking then it would be more worth it when it comes out. Donate if you want to motivate the progress any better.

AFO has been (one of) my favorite online Dreamcast games, highly anticipated to see this title resurrected. Something that peaks my interest is reading about those hidden connection methods, despite hidden they are still useable? In particular “*Serial modem/connection”… if so that would mean a VS Link game has been hiding in plain sight all these years? :O :)